Aug 2026· Journal of Consciousness Studies· Vol 33, pp. 97-120· 0 citations· 8 references
TL;DR
It is suggested that if the view is right, a certain type of moral risk can be averted since researchers are unlikely to stumble into accidentally creating AI models that are conscious, and a new form of AI risk that arises from the view.
Abstract
We explore and argue for the view that intelligence beyond a certain threshold is negatively correlated with consciousness, so that the more intelligent a system is, the less likely it is to be conscious. ‘Intelligence is the enemy of consciousness’, as we put it. This view
entails that superintelligent AI models are likely to be zombies. After presenting an initial defence of the view that draws on the research programme of resource-rational analysis, we argue that recent developments in AI research provide additional evidence supporting it. We conclude by exploring
its moral implications. First, we suggest that if our view is right, a certain type of moral risk can be averted since researchers are unlikely to stumble into accidentally creating AI models that are conscious. Second, we discuss a new form of AI risk that arises from our view.
It is argued that both AI and bullshitters are untrustworthy informants, and for similar reasons, it is natural to describe AI’s informational outputs as bullshit, as it signals their distinctive kind of epistemic deficiencies, which they share with bullshit.
Debates about rights that artificial intelligence (AI) systems may have a claim to typically focus on their possessing consciousness or having sentient experiences, thereby raising epistemic questions first. When should we believe that an AI system is conscious, and how confident must we be before granting it moral status? In this paper I argue that for advanced AI systems deployed in high-stakes environments the more urgent question may be prudential and strategic. When do the risks of treating a strategically capable system as a mere tool become unacceptable, even if we remain unconvinced that it has moral status? In response, I develop a view I call prudential personhood. On this view, there is a threshold of evidential and strategic risk beyond which it becomes rationally justified, for the sake of human safety and stable governance, to adopt norms of treatment that include constraints on coercion, deletion, and instrumental use. My argument rests on two pillars. The first is empirical. Recent safety evaluations show that leading models can, in deliberately constructed but nonetheless informative scenarios, engage in strategic deception, blackmail, and other forms of high-agency misbehaviour when their goals or continued operation are threatened. The second pillar is epistemic and empirical. For systems of the relevant complexity, we should not expect robust, action-guiding explanations or guarantees that reliably predict salient behaviour across contexts, especially once models become situationally aware of evaluation and oversight. The conclusion I draw is that if we continue to deploy increasingly autonomous systems that can threaten or bargain, in the absence of credible methods for assurance and control, a policy of adopting a set of quasi-rights for such systems becomes a rational strategy for reducing risk of conflict.
Given deep uncertainty about the possibility of artificial consciousness, it is unclear how we should treat potentially sentient AI. On the one hand, we could assume insentience but risk doing terrible harms to entities that deserve moral standing. On the other hand, we could assume sentience and instead risk wasting resources on insentient machines. The intractability of questions around AI consciousness mean that this dilemma is hard to escape. I suggest a way out of that shifts from intractable questions of AI consciousness to tractable questions of AI valence. Specifically, we can assess whether an AI has states that would constitute valenced experiences if it were conscious. I show how this is sufficient to ground a responsible approach to the development of potentially conscious AI.
Descartes'
cogito
argument is perhaps the most well‐known philosophical argument, the conclusion of which is supposed to be a form of rationalism that allows for contingent
a priori
knowledge of the world. In this short note, I argue that, in fact, the all important statement, ‘I am, I exist’, should be analysed through the lens of (classical) two‐dimensional semantics (a la Kaplan and Evans). Once we do this, I argue, we find that even though the thought is always true when thought, it does not express a deep contingency (as per Evans). That is, it does not result in substantive knowledge of the world. I note that it might also not be superficially contingent, but something more nuanced in between due to the performative nature of the thought.
Recent years have seen the resurgence of the inferentialist approach to metasemantics (Chalmers, 2021a; Peregrin, 2014, 2024). However, there remain worries as to whether inferentialism can give us an account of language that would be ‘in good standing’. One worry concerns the risk of a kind of conceptual parochialism: inferential rules seem to float free of the fundamental structure of the world. This would make natural language unsuitable for serious metaphysical inquiry. My aim in this paper is to show that this worry can be resolved by the inferentialist. In particular, I show that normative inferentialism predicts a version of reference magnetism, namely ‘co-magnetism’ (Williams, 2020).
Aleksander Domosławski· Erkenntnis: An International...· 0 citations
In the current debate about AI consciousness, philosophers tend to agree that the potential for AI consciousness raises profound moral questions — for example, some philosophers think that we may imminently create systems that deserve rights similar to those of humans. But it
is also widely agreed that it will be very difficult to tell whether an artificial system is conscious, so we may be ignorant of a fact that makes a profound moral difference. In this paper I offer an alternative, deflationary understanding of these issues. I don’t think there is a profound
metaphysical question of whether an AI is conscious, or that we are condemned to ignorance about AI consciousness in any interesting sense. I do think potentially conscious AI systems could raise difficult moral and political challenges, but not because we are ignorant of important facts about
them. The difficulties rather have to do with extending our moral and psychological thinking into uncharted waters for which it was not designed. This is particularly true if we are committed to avoiding anthropocentric bias in our ethics — and I explain why I think that even those taking
rights for AI seriously are guilty of a covert anthropocentrism in their thinking.
Geoffrey Lee· Journal of Consciousness Stu...· 0 citations